Village Carnival Feel at The Fantasy Orchestra Performance

Mumbai 17.05.2018.

I was invited at Royal Opera House near Churni Road to be a part of performance of a group called The Fantasy Orchestra based at Bristol and Paris.

The Fantasy Orchestra

Initially I had a feel that I am at a village carnival and village performers are enjoying singing, dancing with fancy props. something started to happen between the band and the audience… RD Burman, Shadows, Doors, Strawberry Fields, White Rabbit, Move On Up… everyone was drawn into a kind of audience-band unity that’s very rarely achieved in Western culture. When you launched into Bohemian Rhapsody I had a moment of cognitive dissonance, like “Oh no, you can’t play that…”, but I quickly got swept into the brilliance of it, singing along with everyone else. It felt genuinely revolutionary, what you were doing, like the folk music , reclaiming the songs for the people, or something. The intensity of the audience’s energy by the end of that — totally off the scale. I have no idea how the group managed to keep something that complicated on track. Simply the Amazing stuff ! Brilliantly orchestrated and conducted.

The Fantasy Orchestra has started as a community project in Bristol led by Jesse D Vernon and than in Paris. Yesterday the group announced to open a branch at Mumbai. The Orchestra has a simple motto - ‘more is more’. It brings together more than forty musicians, professional and amateur, to create a kaleidoscopic symphonic brigade.

Jesse D Vermon is the man behind The Fantasy Orchestra. Hehad been a full-time musician since he left school in 1988.Having started his musical journey playing violin and piano, he got really involved with the electric guitar aged about 13, his main influences being Blues, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.

Vermon formed his own band, Jesse James and joined a newly formed Bristol based psych-rock group The Moonflowers. This band was a very popular live act and toured extensively between ’88 and ’94. It espoused some of the ideals which have continued to appeal ever since: silliness doesn’t preclude greatness; a performance needs to be entertaining; get everybody involved.

The band were quite a phenomenon of their time. Vermon overplayed a lot of heavily psychedelic guitar and got a lot of it out of his system with The Moonflowers , and also a side-project called Praise Space Electric which had more loftily musical aims.

When The Moonflowers drifted apart in the mid-90’s Vermon collaborated with Portishead bassist Jim Barr and together they made a “trip-hop” type album called The Invisible Pair of Hands.

Around the same time Vermon started a songs project, MorningStar, which has made four albums since 1997.Having enjoyed singing in harmony since his time with the Moonflowers, he started a singing group in Bristol in 2001 called The Keepers Of The Fire after a Moonflowers song for which arranged a wide variety of material including Doo-Wop, Jazz standards, the Velvet Underground and folk music. This continued in Paris when he moved there in 2005. Perhaps feeling constrained by years of writing down rigid musical arrangements, I started an improvisation group in 2010 called the Full Moon Orchestra. The idea was to meet every full moon and that the pieces would be improvised yet structured. Each would be led by a different conductor according to his or her idea and could involve use of signs, specific instructions or other props to facilitate the idea. Each session was completely open to all ages and abilities and the audience was encouraged to participate and indeed conduct the orchestra. The idea proved a success and the Arnolfini in Bristol commissioned me to run a year of Full Moon workshops in 2011/12. Aside from the aforementioned groups Vermon has been a long term collaborator in his wife’s band ThisIsTheKit .

The Fantasy Orchestra initially started as band nights but soon evolved into a kind of themed open-mic event covering the work of artists such as The Doors, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground and Serge Gainsbourg, and other more open themes such as ‘The Wind’, ‘Sadness’ and ‘Whistling’. It was always easy to fill these events with great participants and they were always open for all to perform. But when it came to putting together a night of music by Ennio Morricone, Jesse realised he’d need to get a larger band together which included a choir and could cover most of the night’s entertainment. Thus the Orchestra was born. We dressed up in costumes which went with the mostly Western theme.

The event went so well it was repeated 5 or 6 times during 2012/13, and Jesse formed an orchestra in Paris. The band was having so much fun that we decided to broaden the repertoire, so Jesse added exotic music from the 1950s/60s by the likes of Les Baxter, Disney and Bollywood composers. The dressing-up aspect also became more diverse.

The repertoire is chosen mostly because the original version has great orchestration such as many David Bowie tunes and only a band like their could recreate them. Jesse copies down the scores by ear and sticks to the original as much as possible, though he always has to add more instruments so as to give everyone something to do.